This is exactly what I'm talking about - IMO, your argument really boils down to "he is evil so he'll do evil things".
No, that's not what I'm saying, and I resent you dismissing my position with a straw-man substitute like that. I'm a professional writer. I don't reduce characterizations to stupid simplifications like "evil." What I'm saying is that Dukat has always been a victimizer and abuser, that it's disguised by a thin veneer for the sake of appearances, and that Iliana is a
unique case which allows him to feel free to cast aside the veneer. Dukat's pattern is to manipulate and coerce women into submission through a pattern of seduction and intimidation that makes him feel that he's offering them a benevolent alternative to hardship, even though he's just as responsible for the hardship. Ultimately, he's still dominating them. He's still getting off on his power over them. That's what fundamentally drives him. He wants to be worshipped. He wants his subordinates to love him. But if he can't get their love, he'll settle for their fear. Because ultimately it's all about domination.
Look at how Dukat treated the Bajorans as a people. He tried to make their subjugation more pleasant, believing that it would win their love. When they continued to strike back in anger, he felt betrayed and punished them with harsh reprisals. If you think he wouldn't be equally cruel to a woman who rejected his sexual advances, you're being naive.
Now look at Kira. He tried to win her respect and devotion, but couldn't. Normally, his response would be to lash out and punish her for her "rejection" of him. But he can't touch the real Kira, and that leaves his narcissistic need to dominate unsatisfied. Hence it's a unique situation, creating unique tensions in him.
And Iliana is a unique outlet. You said:
"He uses and victimizes women, so that means he'll do keep a woman as a drugged up prisoner and rape her all the time."
But that's just it. To him, Iliana is not a woman. She's not a person. She doesn't even exist. Her own personality is erased and has no perception of what's being done to her. The personality in its place is merely a copy of the real Kira, so its reactions, its feelings, don't "count." So he's able to define her in his own mind as a non-person, and that leaves him free to do whatever he wants to her.
If you find that hard to believe, study history. Study the Nazi concentration camp guards who were able to execute their prisoners by the thousands without blinking an eye but who then went home and lavished genuine love on their wives and children. It doesn't matter how decent you are to people you define
as people; if you're able to define someone as a non-person, then all bets are off.
So no, I'm not talking about what Dukat would do to
women. Insisting that he sees Iliana as a woman at all is misunderstanding the whole situation. To him, she's not a real person, not a real anything. She's a fantasy object in flesh and blood. She's a release valve for the exceptional frustrations created by his "hands-off" policy toward the real Kira.
If there's anything about the premise that I find unbelievable, it's that Dukat would honor that promise to leave the real Kira alone. I think it's more likely that he'd place his own desires above his promise to a mere Bajoran and would've forced himself on the real Kira one way or another. But obviously that would conflict with canon. Stipulating to the premise that he would keep his word to leave the real Kira alone, everything else about the situation makes sense to me given what we know about Dukat -- the real Dukat when you strip away his self-serving lies.
No it doesn't, because people don't function like that - they do things that they are motivated to do.
And I've explained above what Dukat's motives are in this specific case. It's not about some vague, free-floating concept of "evil," because that would be stupid. It's about understanding the deep-seated, vindictive narcissism that ultimately drives Dukat, and how it would manifest in the unique situation where he has both a Bajoran woman he can't allow himself to dominate and a copy of that woman whom nobody else knows about and whom he's able to define as a non-person.
But there is a very simple distinction between Dukat's seductions and literal rape: he wants to win hearts and minds rather than just to physically enslave people, because this guy needs to believe that he is loved and admired, that people think of him as a great guy and feel grateful to him... and what's more, he needs to believe in that self-image.
But that's only half the equation. Yes, he wants to win hearts and minds, but as I said, when he
fails to win someone's devotion, he gets angry and punishes them for "betraying" him.
Oh come on. As if he couldn't have treated Kira Meru and every other 'comfort woman' the same way if he wanted to? Now that is profoundly naive. You said it yourself, he was in a position of absolute power over these women. Meru did not "exist" anymore either since becoming a comfort woman, her children thought she was dead and to most Bajorans she was a 'collaborator' so they didn't care about her, and as for Cardassians, as if any of them cared what happened to her and how she was treated?!
You're not only being needlessly rude and hostile, but you're contradicting your own argument. You said it yourself, Dukat wants to win the hearts and minds of the people he dominates. And more importantly, since he's a monumental narcissist and ultimately it's all about himself, he wants to convince himself that he's being benevolent to them. But Iliana wasn't a person to him, just a simulation of Kira. In his mind, she had no more reality than a holosuite character. So winning her approval, or feeling good about his treatment of her, didn't matter.
If he ever needed "safety valves" to treat as cruelly as possible without caring how they felt, any of them could have served the purpose.
Again, you're missing the point by confusing the specific with the general. It's not about women, it's about Kira Nerys. Because of his promise to Meru to leave her alone, Kira was a special challenge to him, and thus she became a special fixation. The more he had to watch her from afar, the more intensely he craved her, because being unable to slake his thirsts was an exceptional situation for him. How does a pathological narcissist, someone whose whole reality is defined by the belief that he deserves the gratification of all his desires and whose position gives him the power to get that gratification in almost every case, respond to the unique situation where he can't get what he wants? It's entirely believable that it would become a special obsession and frustration to him. So it wasn't about any woman; it was about Nerys. So finding a duplicate Nerys that nobody knew about, that he could define as a non-person, was an exceptional opportunity to release those exceptional urges.
You say it's out of character for Dukat, and yes, it does contradict his usual behavior patterns in some ways. But no character is absolutely uniform. We're all capable of behaving in uncharacteristic ways in unprecedented circumstances. We all have exceptions to the rules of our normal behavior. Iliana was the exception to the rule for Dukat.
Dukat's hypocritical self-image is not just about public image or opinions of others. It's his own psychological need. He needed to believe that he loved those women and that they loved them, that he was a great guy helping those poor people who were like "children".
Exactly. And he satisfied that urge in Kira Nerys's case by leaving the
real Kira alone, by ensuring that she was protected. That let him feel he was doing a good thing. Taking out his resultant frustrations on the "unreal" Kira in the cell on Letau was his reward for that benevolence. Again, the key is that he didn't think of Iliana as a person, merely as a copy of the actual Kira Nerys.
What has the world come to? Now people even want lame and stupid storylines from novels to be used to retcon canon (and good) backstories from the actual show. 
I understand...
